Juniper & Thorn(58)
Once he wanted to see if the nature of organs was affected by Wakefulness, so he gave me a sleeping draught and I laid down on the couch, my vision fuzzing and then going savagely black. When I woke my corset was gone and Dr. Bakay was perched beside me. He was breathing hard; through the fretwork of my lashes I saw the staggered rising and falling of his chest and the dew of sweat on his brow, and at last the rumpled lap of his trousers. His hand moved under the band of his loosened belt with a grasping, jerking motion. I shut my eyes and pretended to be asleep again. Later, when he stood up to leave, he tried only vaguely to conceal the damp patch on his trousers.
The very last time, he wanted to test what was inside my skin. I was seventeen and unmistakably a woman now, my breasts blooming under his hands. Dr. Bakay took a small blade and cut two smiling wounds beneath each of my nipples, blood welling in red pearls. He caught my blood in clear vials; I watched each droplet slide languidly down the glass and puddle at the bottom, half a fingertip high.
He capped off the vials and tucked them neatly in his doctor’s bag, right next to the porcelain urn of arsenic. Then he told Papa that he had everything he needed, and handed over his final sack of rubles. Papa’s face was as blank and stupid as a boiled ham, but he took the rubles and held them in his fist, the bag rolling and swaying with their weight.
Dr. Bakay tipped his hat to us and went through the door. I watched as he swung open the gate, sunlight clinging to the silver of his hair. I drew my arms over my chest and felt a bite of pain, twin wounds crying out like I was giving suck to a thing with very sharp teeth. In truth I never figured out why Dr. Bakay stopped coming to our house. Perhaps he had exhausted all of his medical curiosity, or perhaps my transforming body had exhausted him.
Quickly, though, I found that it mattered little whether he came back or not. My dreams were riotous with his face and hands and the paunch of his trousers. Of Papa with his rubles and the two men shaking hands. Sometimes I woke from the dreams with a dampness between my legs and I had to run down to the kitchen and eat a whole loaf of black bread with butter and strawberry kvass and seventeen pork varenyky. Thinking of Dr. Bakay always made me so hungry.
Papa had been right. By nightfall there were so many men at our gate that they could not all fit in our foyer even if we wanted them to, and our nearest neighbors were so vexed by the noise that they threatened to call the Grand Inspector on us. Papa, in turn, threatened to turn them into shrubs.
Rose proposed a solution before it resorted to handcuffs and sorcery: we handed out numbered slips of parchment to all the men, indicating their place in the queue. Our house could reasonably hold fifteen at once, so we let the first fifteen men spill through the door and into the foyer, grandfather clock gonging their arrival. The rest of the men retreated, shoulders slumped, clutching the slips of parchment in their fists. When three days had gone by, we would let the next cycle of suitors inside.
And so our house was glutted with fifteen men—boys, really, most of them. They had skinny arms with sharp elbows and hair shorn so close that you could see the pits of their scalps underneath it. Hair longer than an inch, they said, was a liability on the factory floor, and they weren’t going to wear flowered bonnets like the women.
I had expected them to be mean as hunting dogs, but they were more like lazy wolf pups, draping themselves over our furniture and sprawling flat on their backs in the garden. They spoke deferentially to my sisters and me, their gazes downcast, and quickly left the room whenever our father entered.
The goblin was deeply distressed and hid in the branches of our flowering pear tree. Indrik leered furiously from the wheat grass, breathing white smoke through his nostrils and covering the muscles of his chest with linseed oil so they gleamed in the sunlight. Incredibly, it worked, and most of the men were actually afraid of him, this god from the mountaintops with a thousand years behind his eyes.
Rose was not at all pleased, and locked herself in the storeroom for hours at a time, purple mists wafting out from under the door. Undine was more willing to make peace, or at least happy to bask in all the amorous attention. The men crowded around her scrying pool as she made predictions that were half-true at most, laughing sweetly and plucking up her dress to reveal the smooth white oval of her calf.
They all must have asked her, of course, how we managed to elude Papa’s magic, but if Undine ever answered them, she could only have lied. I worried that she might spin her own stories, just on the off chance that one might be true, not caring what Papa would do to a man who carried her lie up to him like a dog with a mangled bird in its maw. Yet surely even my eldest sister could not be so cruel.
I watched from the foyer, nervously opening the wound on my knuckle, flinching whenever they came too near to the juniper tree. When the men did come to speak to me, they were as polite as men could be, inquiring about hexes and haunted attics. Somehow it had gotten around Oblya that a ghost roamed our halls. I told them Papa had warded against malignant spirits, and they nodded, flushing, but I could tell they did not believe me.
Regardless, it kept them away from the third floor, which pleased Papa. He made nice with the men like I had never seen him do before, asking about their origins if they spoke with accents and offering them cabbage rolls and boiled eggs out of the icebox. He even worried over their skinny arms, the ribs that pushed up against their skin. It was so strange to me that I couldn’t even start to make sense of it all, my mind skipping like a broken music box.